The Sheep Market: 10,000 Badly Drawn Sheep!

May 27, 2006 | 0 Minute Read

If you haven’t heard of the Amazon.com mechanical turk, it’s a weird way of getting payed to do human things. There are certain things that humans can do much better than computers (like identify street names and buildings), so Amazon.com pays you to do this stuff at a rate of like, 3 cents per thing you do.

I used it a couple of times to earn like, $1 by identifying buildings before I got bored as hell and quit. Anyway, it looks like someone has finally put this to good use by hiring people to draw sheep facing left. 10,000 of them! I’m kinda disappointed that I didn’t know about this. I coulda been part of internet history! And been payed 2 cents!

If you click on the little thumbnail, it actually shows you the strokes that it took to draw the sheep. Pretty cool. At 2 cents per sheep, the whole project cost $200. Not too bad, really. Where else are you gonna get 10,000 pictures of sheep?